This day was total fun, as I got to plug into Susanna’s awesome cruise directing. We were starting with an 11:00 tea at Fortnum & Mason, so I ended up skipping breakfast, just leisurely got my act together in the room. My room was pretty awesome, by the way, and the coffee machine (with little pods) was the best in-room coffee on the trip.
God knows what you’re supposed to keep in that fridge, though.
I headed over to the airBnB where the Adamses and Percontis were staying, about a 10 minute walk. Cute little apartment, although apparently poorly laid out, as they’d discovered when all 4 of them tried to be in the living area at the same time. The Percontis were staying in, so Susanna, Patrick and I headed for the bus, and had a nice leisurely ride into the center of town on the upper level. Cue Joni Mitchell singing about refusing to ride on all those double-decker buses ‘because there was no driver on the top’.
We passed the Ritz, where apparently we could have gone to tea if we’d wanted to get dressed up. Apparently Fortnum & Mason kindly realizes that tourists are out all day and might not be super-formal, but of course you shouldn’t be a slob either. We were quite early, so spent a bit of time walking around, finding Piccadilly Circus and walking around a few blocks, then exploring the F&M store.
Tea was amazing. I’d only done that sort of formal tea once before (by myself, in NYC). It was clear as we got going that Patrick had no idea what to expect, so Susanna and I explained it to him, and then so did the friendly staff. You ordered one of several pre-set menus – a standard tea with finger sandwiches, scones, and sweet pastries, a ‘savory tea’ for those without a sweet tooth, or a ‘high tea’ where you got an actual main dish instead of sandwiches. And you each got a pot of tea, which you could select from the tea menu(!). We all got the standard afternoon tea offering, and I chose the ‘wedding breakfast’ tea, a special blend created to mark the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2011.
The sandwiches were, let’s see: smoked fish, egg salad, cucumber, beef and coronation chicken. (I love coronation chicken – it’s chicken salad with curry, and so good, and i should try to make it. You don’t see it in the US, for obvious reasons). One plain scone and one ‘fruited’ scone. And the pastries… there was a not-chocolate eclair, a faux tangerine that was amazing, a lemon cake, a strawberry mousse and a raspberry tart. Didn’t finish it all, ended up stuffed. (no chocolate anything except the stem on the tangerine, maybe, that was a shame). We had bubbly, as you can see, and my tea was really great. Completely delicious, and I may try to do something similar on my birthday next month.
Afterward, we had more time to kill before meeting in Piccadilly Circus for a pub tour, so did some more foot exploration and went down to Covent Garden, poked around, went into the Royal Opera House.
In front of the Shakespeare statue, Patrick was Hamlet and I was Yorick.
Back to Piccadilly Circus, where the Percontis showed up and Susanna found our guide, a wonderful energetic young man named Henry. I wasn’t quite sure how the pub tour was going to work (and apparently that’s true of all pub tours, they differ wildly), but what he did was first point out from where we are the different parts of town we could see from the winged statue, then took us into Soho. There was a lot of history of strip clubs and rock and roll legends (and Mozart) and took us to 4 pubs along the way: Duke of Argyll, Coach and Horses, Dog and Duck and the Ship.
This was a great deal of fun. I will say that it would have never occurred to me to book either the tea or the pub tour and I had such a good time doing both.
The Adamses and Percontis were all going to see Back to the Future: the Musical, but I’d already seen that on Broadway, so I’d taken the opportunity to get a ticket to the amazing Nicholas Hytner immersive Guys & Dolls everyone had been raving about. I was to be joined by my amazing friend Claire Little, who I’d done my very first Savoynet show with back in 2003, but she hasn’t done them recently because she switched careers and is now a professional stage manager. (this is the same woman who took me on an amazingly comprehensive tour of London back in 2008, the last time I was there) So I’d booked a reservation at the Ivy for dinner at 5:15, and we were wrapping up the pub tour at 4:30 or so. I had absolutely no sense of where I was or how far I had to travel from Soho – luckily, the phone told me (i.e., leave now) and I made quick goodbyes to my lovely friends and hustled off to get a bus. (Shoutout to Google Maps, which did not steer me wrong, my route worked exactly as promised.) I was a wee bit late, Claire was already seated, but that wasn’t a big deal, we had plenty of time and were right next to the theater.
It was great getting caught up and hearing about her new adventures, and passing on the many many well-wishes from the Savoynetters who know her and hadn’t seen her any more recently than I had. Dinner was fine – I had soup and a calamari appetizer and ice cream for ‘pudding’.
Then off to Guys & Dolls. This production was played in the round with narrow playing spaces criss-crossing the center rectangle and raising and lowering as needed. We were seated, but like Much Ado, there was part of the audience standing throughout, but they were in the playing space and there was a whole crew of ASMs who had to maneuver the crowds around to get them out of the way of the next playing space to rise up. But they got to participate too, like in the Havana scene, where they waved sparkly glitter thingies. Here’s the preview video, this will show you what this all looked like.
It was fantastic. I’d never actually see G&D on stage before, just the movie, and as I suspected, it’s a really great show. So well-written, delightful throughout, and this production was a joy from start to finish. All the leads were great, the dancing was wonderful, and so cleverly staged. The big dance that starts the Havana scene was so brilliant, I was literally crying, I was so overwhelmed with joy. And then Sky danced with a guy, and it was hot AF, and you could totally buy that Sky was the type of guy to take, um, pleasure where he found it.
Our Mikado stage director had seen it a few weeks earlier, and loved it, but he’d had a problem with having a black Adelaide. I personally don’t mind colorblind casting if the show isn’t about race, I just mentally plop the show in an alternate universe where that’s just not an issue. I am interested, though, to see how they address race in the new Audra Gypsy. Much like her Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music, concerns about such things are completely overridden by “let Audra do anything she wants to do, it will be fantastic”.
I was mildly worried about getting back to Parsons Green afterward, but it turned out that the tube stop that Claire needed (across Tower Bridge) was also the one I needed, although we were taking different lines in different directions. Big hugs and goodbyes, and I didn’t have any problem getting back. By then it was quite late, but just as with the previous night, the Aragon House pub was hopping, so I had a cider before heading upstairs for chocolates, water and sleep.
What a great day!
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